140Char

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Magpie Network advertising service for Twitter, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. Such as ReadWriteWeb, Jeremiah Owyang, and Techcrunch.

I bet the Twitter team are looking at the responses with interest!

But James Cridland picked up on an incredibly effective and authentic Word of Mouth event on Twitter. I’ll summarise, so you can go and read the full article, ‘Word of Mouse - @stephenfry sells bucketloads of Tweetie‘. Hugely popular celebrity and ‘proper’ Tweeter Stephen Fry mentioned some Twitter clients, received a recommendation for a paid client for the iPhone, posted a positive review of it, and gained a huge number of responses from people who appear to have paid for the client on his recommendation.

Who would have though that an influential celebrity who is authentically using a service could have a direct effect on a product? I’m off to persuade U.S. basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal he should be promoting 140char!

We’ve got a new section to highlight and collate all of the best case studies of business and enterprise using microblogging in one place, as well as in individual blog posts. As the list fills up, you’ll be able to see it all, here.

Starting off is an example of customer service on Twitter as David Cushman recently posted.

David tweeted about his problem signing up to Qik on his Nokia N73. He didn’t contact the company directly, and probably would have just given up if left to his own devices. But Jackie Danicki, Director of Marketing at Qik was monitoring what was being said, found the tweet, and also located David’s email address to contact him directly, as well as sending him an SMS with a relevant link. Which led to him posting in praise of the company even before a solution was provided to his problem.

One happy advocate blogging about his experience and sharing his recommendations on and offline before he’s even tried the product!